Southside Hospital Receives “Gold Plus” Award for Stroke Care

Southside Hospital (SSH), part of the North Shore-LIJ Health System, has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines®–Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award. The award recognizes SSH’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care by ensuring that stroke patients receive treatment according to nationally accepted guidelines.

“We are dedicated to making our care for stroke patients among the best in the country. The American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines®–Stroke program helps us to accomplish this goal,” said Edward Firouztale, DO, SSH’s director of stroke. “This recognition demonstrates that we are on the right track and we’re very proud of our team.”

Get With The Guidelines®–Stroke helps SSH’s staff develop and implement acute and secondary prevention guideline processes to improve patient care and outcomes. The program provides hospitals with a web-based patient management tool, best practice discharge protocols and standing orders, along with a robust registry and real-time benchmarking capabilities to track performance.

The quick and efficient use of guideline procedures can improve the quality of care for stroke patients and may reduce disability and save lives.

“Recent studies show that patients treated in hospitals participating in the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke program receive a higher quality of care and may experience better outcomes,” said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get With The Guidelines National Steering Committee and director of the TeleStroke and Acute Stroke Services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA. “Southside Hospital’s stroke team is to be commended for their commitment to improving the care of their patients.”

Following Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke treatment guidelines, patients are started on aggressive risk-reduction therapies including the use of medications such as tPA, antithrombotics and anticoagulation therapy, along with cholesterol reducing drugs and smoking cessation counseling. These are all aimed at reducing death and disability and improving the lives of stroke patients. Hospitals must adhere to these measures at a set level for a designated period of time to be eligible for the achievement awards.

For more information about SSH’s stroke program, call 631-968-3314. For more information about Get With The Guidelines®, visit heart.org/quality.